Kindo Family Blog

Hey, everybody has a great family. And we all love our moms and dads. But our stats show that some of you have amazingly great family trees on Kindo!

We are happy that you love using Kindo as much as we do and wanted to say thank you to all of you! But it won’t be just talking, we will give you real presents as well:

The “Biggest Family Tree” and the “Biggest Family Community” on Wednesday the 20th of February at high noon will get a Spreadshirt-voucher for our Kindo shop worth 20 Euros!

So why don’t you get youself a free “Daddy’s favourite” - T-Shirt like the one on that pic here? Just grow your tree and become the Kindo family with the highest number of profiles or the highest number of family members who joined the tree! And by the way: We will have one winner per language.

Show everybody that you have the greatest family on earth: Tell your relatives and get the Kindo “Biggest Family” award!

You have probably heard about Kindo’s 14 languages or seen all the flags in the dropdown field in the top right corner on kindo.com, or in the sidebar of this blog. Kindo is an international project, but it is local at the same time!

You can use the application in whatever of the languages you feel most comfortable in, and your relatives can use the same tree in another language, if they prefer! And in case you have any questions, you can ask your local Kindo colleague for help. You can see all our local country managers on the following map:

You might know them from the local blog in your language already. Feel free to get in touch with them by just sending an email to firstname@kindo.com. The local domains will work as well, like julia@kindo.es if you want a answer in Spanish or martin@kindo.se if you prefer Swedish They are always happy to help, listen to feedback or any other questions you might have!

Last week, we had a famous and interesting visitor in Istanbul. We were invited to a seminar by Jimmy Wales who is the founder of Wikipedia. It’s not so common that this type of guests speak everyday in your country so we went there. It took place in Ortakoy Esma Sultan Yalısı which is one of the best organization centers in Istanbul. The good thing about the seminar was invitees were all from either press or the bloggers. So, we also had a great chance to have some networking opportunities with the people whom we personally do not know but follow their blogs.

For example, Volkan (http://blog.wolkanca.com/) who was so responsive in his Kindo investigations and one of the first to give a link to Kindo website was also there. We also came across Suleyman who is a devoted blog writer with his professional camera while taking pictures for his website www.gunesintamicinde.com and I need to thank to him since he took our pictures when I got angry to myself for forgetting my camera at home. In addition to that, we also had a chance to talk to many other bloggers of which Arda Kutsal was a great supporter of Kindo. Arda is a well known blogger in Turkey with his www.webrazzi.com and www.blograzzi.com websites and his enthusiasm to follow the latest trends in web2.0 world. He said Kindo is a great place for family social networking and informed me about his coming review about Kindo and niche social networking websites in general. I’ll keep you posted about his review as well.

The conference was really perfect in terms of the organization and in terms of the performance of Jimmy in presenting and answering questions. Main topics discussed were about Wikipedia’s future stance and Wikia search. I will not go in detail about this in this blog post which you might elsewhere find about it; however, I can say Jimmy kept insisting on Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and not seeking for easy way of earning money from paid advertising. And, they have now focused on Wikia search engine project. I was also surprised that there are only 12 people working officially for Wikipedia.

We waited the whole conference ended to have a personal contact with him and introduce Kindo. However, we only had the chance to take a picture as a memory from the day. But, then I have sent an email to him and asked for testing Kindo. I’ll tell you in another blog post when he writes to me next time.

Until then, as the fellows here say, get your family and have a great time with them.

From today we have the full range of flags showing all the languages Kindo is available in.

It will make it easier for you to find the language setting you are looking for and shows our international flair Enjoy.

The São Paulo - edition of the Swedish free newspaper Metro has mentioned us on the same page with Steve Jobs and the new Macbook Air

So read on the very top:
“Site permite criar rede social só para a família”, yeah that’s right.

Thanks again to Henrique for arranging that. You might have read about him when he joined our team last week.

The ninjas at the Kindo family have been working diligently over the past two weeks with one main goal in mind - to make Kindo perform better! This is in response to a number of complaints from users that the application has been a bit slow to respond and we wrote a post to let users know about this.

According to our resident technical maestro Demian, average family tree loading times have been significantly improved, for example the public tree of the British Royal family tree can be expected to be almost 26 times as fast. The improvements are mainly thanks to Demian and Dmitri, who made some huge improvements to the database, infrastructure and code in general. Nice work guys…

I truly believe the improvements have made the application an absolute pleasure to use, so go on adding some more family to your tree and let us know how the application performs.

Apart from the huge performance improvements, we have got a few more exciting features in store for all of you Kindo fanatics, so stay tuned.

More than 500 readers have voted already! We never expected this kind of response. Just in case you havent answered yet, this is the last chance to express yourself about these questions:

• How far is your family spread out geographically?
• Do your close relatives live across national or even continental borders?

Just tick the respective bubble in the sidebar on the right and click on “vote”. The votes are anonymous! Just as you are used to, your privacy is very important for us at Kindo.

And very soon we will analyse the results and share the interesting bits of it with all of you.
I am already looking forward to that.

We are glad that you like Kindo and go on talking about us. It was obviously the Chinese and Arabic languages that make you happy. Internetworld, one of the biggest internet newspapers in Sweden for example, has put Martin on the front page.

And it is the core family networking features of Kindo as well that caught your attention and our Team is always happy to talk with you about it. Simon for example got featured in a seven minute video interview on Intruders, that is a follow up of “le web 3″ - conference in Paris last month.

And you can see that France is going crazy about Kindo by looking at two more great posts on Emob and the French version of Techcrunch.

Thanks for your coverage and stay in touch!

Probably the number one feature request for Kindo, over and above better deleting of profiles in the family tree, is for photos. We always knew that would come, so I’m pleased as punch to say that we’re working on it, and hope to release the first iteration of Kindo family photos soon.

That said, I would like to know if there are any specific photo features that Kindo users would like to see, apart from the usual features you’d find on any social service that enables you to store photos (creating and viewing albums, uploading photos to albums, commenting on both, tagging photos; are the basics).

For example, here are some ideas that have been flying around the Kindo office of late:

1. Send photo as digital postcard - imagine sending that photo of your wedding / family event to your family easily
2. Add to your favourites - imagine having a list of all your favourite photos of your family
3. Let people outside my family tree see my photos - imagine being able to allow your close friends to view your photos without them having to log in
4. Being able to crop/move/rotate photo’s - imagine being able to do stuff to your photos in the browser so they look better
5. Viewing some stats - imagine being able to see how many people viewed your albums / photos, and what photos are most popular

Anyways, these are just some ideas, and are pretty much influenced by what is already out there.

We’d like to build stuff that people will use a lot, and enjoy using, so it’s really important that we get some feedback from you guys to understand what’s really important to you!

So, please comments in this post - what do you want to see in a photos feature??

kindo, features, web2.0, photos, users, usability

We are proud to announce that Kindo is now available in three more languages:

• Arabic, which looks great with the text from right to left
• Simplified Chinese, which is simply beautiful
• and Traditional Chinese, whatever you prefer

The Chinese translation has been done voluntarily by the IT-team of CJCHT, a consumer goods company with offices in Hong-Kong, China, Taiwan, the US and the UK. Those guys had seen Kindo and liked it so much that they helped us realising the Chinese site.

It is a next step in bringing our family social network to the world’s high-growth Internet markets. Kindo is one of an increasing number of European and US-based Internet start-ups that have realized the big potential of fast-growing markets like China or Africa. According to Internet World Stats, the growth in Internet users since the year 2000 amounts to about 620% in China and 490% in the Middle East, as compared to a European growth of only 170% during the same period.

Gareth said: “Launching Chinese and Arabic is a logical step in our truly international strategy. China is a very exciting opportunity for us, and we’re eager to expand further in Asia”.

To make this release a reality, our development team has managed to overcome technical challenges, such as the writing direction in Arabic, and the handling of the more than 50,000 characters in Chinese.

Thanks again to Henry and his team at CJCHT.
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